


or you will teach him all your art of war

by greenlily



Category: Magids Series - Jones
Genre: Adolescent Flailing, Adventure, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:53:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All right. There's this, this person. And he's done something. It was really stupid, and he deserves some sort of punishment, I expect, but he doesn't deserve what he's apt to get. And he's come to me for help. I…" I stopped. "I need him to be all right. I need him. Please. Help me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	or you will teach him all your art of war

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thenewradical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenewradical/gifts).



> Many thanks to athenejen for a speedy and supportive beta!

_Nick says I ought to explain things before I begin the story proper. Maree says I should only tell the bits which would interest someone who's not a teenaged girl. Romanov says I should tell only the bits I want to tell. Catherine says I should write everything down, just because, and then edit out the bits I don't want anyone else to read. Rupert and my grandfather both say they don't much care how I do it, so long as I document everything for the Magids' files on the Koryfonic Empire. And Max says I should begin at the beginning and go on until I reach the end and then stop. And his mother is a writer, so he ought to know. So._

 

* * * * * * * *

** Sunday **

Sunday began quite normally, with the sounds of hens and the goat and Catherine whistling while she did the milking. We had agreed, the first day I got here, that I would look after the evening chores and get some extra sleep in the mornings. I had been more or less ill for months by then, and sleep didn't come easily.

Catherine Novarro is a sort of adopted niece of Romanov's. There's something complicated about her family that I don't entirely understand, but in the end she had magical potential and no parents so Romanov brought her to live on his island. She takes lessons in magic, and helps look after the animals, and reminds Romanov to look after himself properly. He grumbles about it, rather, but I suspect he secretly likes it. When I'd first visited the island, it had seemed a bit empty.

It was because of Catherine that I went to stay on the island. Romanov had a lot of traveling to do over three or four months, and Catherine is just fourteen—old enough to stay alone if she really had to, but not old enough to like it much. So Romanov came to Blest and asked Mrs. Candace if she could spare me for the summer.

Despite what Max says, I probably ought to explain this bit, because I'm not sure what the Magids' files say about Blest since the Dragon woke. The balance of Blest is maintained by two wizards. The Merlin supervises everything made by people: laws, justice, politics and the magics that surround them. The Lady of Governance looks after the land itself, and its magics, and everything to do with the non-human creatures we share it with. Before the Dragon, this was not understood very well by most people.

After the Dragon, Mrs. Candace—the current Lady of Governance—told me that I was slated to take her place when I grew up. This is because of some extremely old magic that I have inherited, although that really _is_ too long a story to tell here. In any case, I've been living with her for the two years since the Dragon, learning how to look after the magic of Blest.

It was slow going at first, and then last winter the patterns began making sense. And that was when I began to feel exhausted all the time, and my joints ached and my head ached and my eyes blurred. It was like being suddenly ninety years old. It was _awful_. Mrs. Candace said it was because I hadn't yet learned to separate my sense of my own health from my sense of the health of the land. Blest hasn't recovered yet from the upheaval of magic that came with the Dragon.

Romanov's island contains a bit of almost everything—so many different places and times that I can't count them. It has just enough of Blest in it that I can still feel it, but not enough to make me ill. I suppose it's like getting a vaccination, a small amount of Blest to make me build up defenses against the rest of it.

I had been on the island for about two weeks before Romanov had to leave on his first trip. He'd gone on Saturday night after supper, giving Catherine a rough hug and me a pat on the shoulder and then walking away around a corner of the sheds and vanishing. Catherine and I had stayed awake past midnight, talking and drinking cocoa with too much cream in it, and Sunday morning came far too early to suit me.

Nonetheless, I dragged myself out of bed and washed and dressed and went to the kitchen. When Catherine came in with the morning's eggs, I had set the table for breakfast—something no one bothers to do when Romanov's home—and was juggling bacon and fried bread and tomatoes.

_"Coffee."_ Catherine dropped onto a chair and poured half the coffee-pot into the enormous mug I'd set at her place. I don't know what it is about Earth that makes its people so dependent on coffee, but both Nick and Catherine are obsessed. Unlike Nick, Catherine gets chatty as soon as she's begun to drink it. "What are you going to do today, Roddy?"

"Wash the dishes." I thought about it. "Deal with the garden. Read. Take a walk. You?"

"I'm going to clean house," said Catherine.

I stared at her. "This is a _wizard's_ house. It cleans itself."

"It's not the _same_," said Catherine fiercely. "It can't be. A house needs people to, to, to put some work into it. To take care of it and be shown that its people are thinking about it."

"I don't know, Cate." I picked up the pans and put them in the sink. "If Romanov wanted his house cleaned without magic, wouldn't he have done it himself? Or hired it done? He'll be back on Wednesday, you could ask him then."

"No. I want to have it done by the time he comes back. As a surprise." Catherine's chin had gone stubborn. "The new boy is coming on Wednesday, too. He's called Max."

I understood a great deal better after that. Romanov doesn't normally take students, apart from Catherine and Nick, and certainly none of his other students had come to stay.

"All right." I turned off the tap and sat back down at the table. "All right. I'll help. The garden can wait a bit."

We spent the rest of Sunday morning making lists of things to be done, and then spent Sunday afternoon beginning to do them. Catherine had to say counterspells to get through some of the magic Romanov had set on the house. There were two rooms that wouldn't let her in, no matter what counterspells she said, and we had to give up on those altogether.

The weather was beautifully sunny, mocking us as we spent all day inside. It was also stiflingly hot. Catherine kept making us both stop to drink cups of water, not too cold. After an hour of working, we were both dripping with sweat; I tied scarves over both our heads to keep the salt out of our eyes.

By suppertime, we'd dragged and carried all the furniture and things from most of the other rooms into the living room. I think there must have been more magic in that room that Catherine's counterspells didn't touch, because no matter how many things we moved in there, the room was still big enough to walk among the piles and stacks of chairs and beds and books.

Whatever magic normally cleaned the house hadn't done a very good job lately. We were both covered with dust and spiderwebs and kept picking up bits of odd splinters and things on the bottoms of our shoes. It occurred to me somewhere around the fourth bedroom that the house's own magic might be arranging for Catherine to find it dirty, so that she could clean it.

"There, that's better already," said Catherine, standing in the hallway and looking at the empty rooms that showed through the open doors. "Tomorrow we begin scrubbing and polishing. Oh, and washing the linens."

"Cate, the linens are already clean. You took them out of the closet yourself. They're all folded and pressed."

"I don't care." She bent to stretch her back, and the too-small jeans she'd put on for the dirty work creaked alarmingly at the seams. "We need to wash them and hang them on a clothesline outside so they can be out in the sun, and smell of fresh air and grass and things."

I sighed. I'd only been there two weeks, but I'd already learned that there was no arguing with Catherine when she fixed her mind on an idea she'd got out of a book. I didn't know which one this particular plan had come from, but when I found out I was going to track it down and _burn it_.

"Tomorrow, then. What would you like for supper?" Looking pleased with herself, my utterly mad temporary house-mate trotted off to the kitchen. I sighed again and went to look after the goat.

** Monday **

Monday began with the sounds of the hens and the goat and whistling.

The tune cut off abruptly as something clanked and rattled, jolting me entirely awake. Silence, then, "Roddy! _Roddy!_ Come quick!" I recognized the note in Catherine's voice: panic, but not the sort that meant she thought she'd done something wrong.

I jumped out of bed, pulled on a long skirt under my nightshirt, and ran outside barefoot. The hens scattered as I skidded to a stop in the yard. No Catherine. "Cate? Where are you?"

"Here." She was in the garden. I'd left a bucket full of trowels and shears and small rakes, propped against the fence, but it wasn't Catherine who'd kicked it over.

That had clearly been the work of a pair of enormous, battered trainers. They belonged to the tall boy in the leather jacket who was curled on his side and gasping for breath on the gravel path.

Oh, _hell_.

"Nick." I knelt carefully beside him, mindful of the gravel, and put a hand between his shoulderblades. "Nick."

Nick stopped thrashing and rolled onto his back. He took a deep breath and let it out. Then another. Then he crawled backwards, leaned over on one elbow, and was copiously sick.

"Bleah," said Catherine. "Be back in two shakes." She hurried towards the house.

I got to my feet, went round the bend of the path to one of the herb beds, and picked a handful of spearmint leaves. When I came back, Nick was lying propped on his elbows, looking far too pale, but he had stopped heaving and was scooping gravel from the path over the patch of sick.

He looked up as I held out the mint. "Here. This will help your stomach. And your mouth. Nick, what are you _doing_ here?"

"I was going to ask you that," Nick said hoarsely, sitting up. He put some of the leaves in his mouth and chewed gingerly.

"I'm visiting with Catherine for the summer. She's Romanov's adopted something-or-other. He didn't want her to be lonely when he traveled, so he invited me to stay."

Nick swallowed his mouthful of spearmint. "Catherine? That's the girl who was here just now?"

I nodded. "She's gone to get you some water, I think. It's too hot to be out here in that jacket. Want to try moving?"

"No, but I think I'd better. Would you…" He held out both hands. I took them and pulled until he was more or less standing. "Thanks. This might not have been the best idea." He swayed, and without thinking about it I dropped his hands and put my arms round him to hold him up.

"You're taller," I said to Nick's shirt pocket. He was a new shape, too, wider in the shoulders, and he'd grown into his neck and wrists, but I didn't like to mention that somehow. Two years ago, on this island, I'd let him hold me like this for an eyeblink instant before I'd pushed him away and run off. This was different.

"I finally did it," Nick muttered. "Your granddad has to be drunk before he can travel between worlds my way, and I suppose I've got to be horribly angry before I can travel his way." Before I could ask him what he was angry about, his head dropped onto my shoulder and all his weight leaned on me. I staggered a bit, and swore at the gravel that drove into my bare feet.

"Oh my," said Catherine behind me. "Should I pour this over his head instead?"

 

"No," I said through gritted teeth. "He's not being impudent, he's just passed out. We'd better bring him inside." Catherine set the cup of water on the path and came over to drape one of Nick's arms over her shoulders.

It was a long walk back to the house, through the garden and the grass and the chickens. We'd never have done it if Nick hadn't been already on his feet, and I couldn't have done it alone in any case. Catherine is only five-foot-three and weighs nearly two hundred pounds, but I had found out yesterday that quite a lot of that is muscles.

At last, we hauled Nick into one of the bedrooms that still had some furniture in it. We set him down on the bed, put a glass of water on the nightstand, and left him to sleep.

"Where are we?" said Catherine. She looked at her watch. "Oh, good. It's still only ten. We can get an awful lot of cleaning done today."

Which is what we did. Every now and then, one of us would stop to fix a sandwich and a cup of tea, or to look in on Nick. He moved around a bit, but didn't actually wake up, and neither of us could tell whether it was an ordinary sleep or whether he was hurt or ill.

By the time Catherine and I fell into bed, more than half the rooms in the house were scrubbed clean. Neither of us said anything, but we were both rather glad Romanov would be back day after next to cope with whatever had happened to Nick.

** Tuesday **

Tuesday began, some two hours later than usual, with birdsong, the hens, and the sounds of an angry goat. Not to mention a distinct lack of whistling. I got up and got dressed and went to look in on Catherine. She was sleeping like a rock with her head under the pillow. I sighed and went out to do the morning chores.

When I'd seen to the animals, I poked my head into Nick's room. It looked as though he'd woken sometime in the night, taken off his shoes and socks and jacket, wandered to the bathroom, and then gone back to bed, all with his eyes shut.

Catherine was in the kitchen by then, and was serving out cornflakes with a sheepish look on her face. "I am _so_ sorry," she said.

"_I_ don't mind, once in a while. Apologize to the hens, if you want, but I expect they've forgotten it already." I rummaged in the fridge. "Is there any applesauce? Nick might be able to eat that when he wakes up."

Silence.

"Cate? Do you know where the…never mind, got it." I straightened up and turned round with the jar in my hand.

There was a boy standing in the doorway to the yard. He and Catherine were staring at each other.

"Hello?" I said at last. "Normally I'd ask whether you're lost."

"I'm not," said the boy, still staring at Catherine. He dropped the rucksack from his shoulders and took a few big steps towards her, dropping to one knee at the end of the last one. Then he took one of her hands in both of his and bowed his head over it.

Catherine jerked her hand away. "What? Who are you?"

"Fairer than voices of winds that sing," said the boy, looking up into her face. Then, "I mean, you are. That's not who I am. I mean."

 

"You're _mental_," said Catherine, and turned and ran into the living room. I heard several crashes as she smashed into heaps of furniture, and then the thudding of her feet running up the stairs.

"Sorry," said the boy. He did look sorry, too, but it was the sort of sorry where he knew that apologizing made him look so charming you'd forgive him. He was rather tall and weedy, with long shaggy dark-rusty-brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He gave me a sort of wistful smile. "I shouldn't've said that."

"Who are you?" I said crisply. "And if you give me a rubbishy answer like that, I'll tip this jar over your head."

"No, please don't," he said, and held out a hand to be shaken properly. "I'm Max Burton. It's Matthew, really, but there were two other Matthews in my class when I started school, so we had to improvise. I've been sent here to study with Mr. Romanov."

"Oh." I set the jar on the table. "We weren't expecting you until tomorrow, but never mind. You can help us move the furniture. I'm Roddy Hyde, visiting for the summer. Would you like a cup of tea?"

"_Yes_," said Max fervently. "But if you don't mind, I'd rather pick up whatever your friend knocked over, first. I've been taught to clean up after myself, and if I don't do it right away, it'll bother me."

"Well, Romanov will soon cure you of that," I said over my shoulder, heading for the living room.

Max Burton might look as though he'd blow over in a strong breeze—flapping his mad hair behind him like wings—but he could move furniture with the best of them. Catherine had tipped over several stacks of chairs and some bookshelves that we had had to take to pieces, and Max and I set to work restoring some semblance of order.

Besides being tidy, Max also liked to talk. I learned that he was nineteen, had finished school last year, and lived in a huge ancient house near Oxford with his mother and a crowd of other adults and the small daughter of one of the married couples in the house. His mother was a journalist, but most of the other people who lived with them were teachers at the school he'd gone to. It was a boarding school for kids who were studying music or dance or magic; he had been running about in its library and practice rooms since before he could read. There was at least one university degree in his future, and the notion of a gap year on a farm would have appealed to him even if the farmer hadn't been a wizard.

I listened to this with interest for a while. I rather liked the sound of his household, even though having half-a-dozen parents fussing at me instead of two didn't seem very appealing. Eventually, his clockwork ran down, and we re-stacked furniture in silence for a bit.

Finally he said, "What's your friend's name, then?"

"Catherine," I told him. "She isn't always like that, but she's not happy to have another student coming to live here at all, and she thought you were making fun of her on top of it."

Max sighed. "I wasn't. Truly. At school, even the girls who aren't dancers all want to look like them. Tight hair and pointy collarbones. It's a relief to see someone who doesn't look breakable."

"I wouldn't recommend telling her that," I said.

"Really?" Max lifted the last chair to the top of its stack. "If she's not used to being called beautiful, it's high time she was." He dusted his hands on his jeans. "How about that tea now?"

Catherine didn't come downstairs for the rest of the day.

Max helped me scrub the rest of the emptied rooms, and we began to put back pieces of furniture. I didn't like to do too much of that without Catherine, not when she had been so set on being the one to work on this house. We left a tray of sandwiches in the hallway outside her door. After lunch, we went for a walk all round the island, and I showed Max the garden.

"I've got work to do out here," I said, eyeing the overgrown raspberry bushes. "Catherine had better be speaking to you tomorrow, or the pair of you can finish cleaning house in utter silence for all of me."

"What's down that way?" Max gestured to where the path branched off from the herb beds.

"Rose garden," I told him. "Romanov said I'm to leave it alone. I've been here two weeks and I haven't even been in there yet."

"You don't look like a weeding and pruning sort," said Max as we walked back to the house.

"Well, what sort do I look like?"

Max put his head on one side, like my little-girl cousins pretending to be glamorous. "You look like the sort who'd raise an entire field of wildflowers and call it a garden."

That's how it came about that I spent that afternoon baking four batches of scones and telling a near-total stranger all about my inherited ancient magic. Max asked questions I'd never thought of, and took other bits quite for granted. I'd have known, even if he hadn't told me, that he planned to be a teacher after he finished university.

Supper was like lunch, only this time Max cooked it (scrambled eggs and tinned beans and toast), and I took another tray upstairs. Catherine had eaten the sandwiches and put the empty tray outside her door again. I knocked, but she didn't answer. I looked in on Nick.

When I came downstairs, Max was scrubbing out the scrambled-egg pan. "I hope young Catherine can cook," he said ruefully. "If not, we're going to get awfully tired of breakfast food for supper." He looked up, then, and saw my face, and dropped the pan in the sink with a crash. "What on earth's the matter?"

"Max, do you know anything about people getting ill when they travel here from Earth?" I told him about Nick. I was becoming very uneasy. Nick had been asleep for over twenty-four hours, not counting his arrival and whatever wandering around he'd done in the night, and I was starting to wonder if he'd hit his head when he landed.

"No." Max looked thoughtful. "I'd never traveled like that before this morning, and I've never met anyone else who traveled at all."

"What?" I looked at him. "How did you get here, then? I thought someone on Earth must have been teaching you."

"Oh, yes," said Max. "There are half a dozen teaching wizards on staff at school. One of them knows Mr. Romanov. She got him to make me this." He dug in his pockets and came up with what looked like a key tag with a dim blue-white glass bead on it. "It's a bit like a one-way train ticket. One of my mates drove me out to the woods, and I had to hike until the bead lit up, and then follow whichever direction it lit brightest. It was like a torch when I started, but it faded as I walked here. That's how I knew I'd arrived."

"Hang on." I held up a hand. "Did you say one-way?"

"I did. Until Mr. Romanov turns up and spells me another one, I'm afraid you're stuck with me. Just as well, really." Max grinned and jumped his eyebrows at me. "Unless you fancy giving your boyfriend up there a bath all by yourself. Where shall I park my gear?"

** Wednesday **

Wednesday began with the sounds of hens, and the goat, and Catherine whistling as she did the milking. And someone else, whistling another tune altogether, something that wove in and out of Catherine's melody.

I looked into Nick's room and was relieved to see that his eyes were open. He was still a worrisome ash-pale colour, but he was definitely awake.

"Hullo, Roddy," he said. His voice had gone to gravel, and his eyes went wide when he saw me. "Er. You've let your hair grow."

I looked down. My hair had grown halfway to my hips since he'd seen me last, and it tumbled over my shoulders and down my nightshirt. My ancient, worn-thin, barely-covered-my-knees, pale blue nightshirt with pictures of starfish on it.

"Get yourself in a shower or I'll let Max drag you there," I said, and slammed the door.

When I got downstairs, Max was making coffee and putting scones on a plate. Catherine came in through the door from the yard. She was wearing a clean shirt today, and jeans that fit properly, but I gave her a mental round of applause for not having put on lipstick or done anything different to her hair.

Catherine set the bowl of eggs on the counter and held out her hand to Max. "I'm very sorry about yesterday," she said. "There was no need for me to be rude. You surprised me, is all."

"I'm sorry I startled you, then," said Max. He shook hands with her like a lorry driver, one quick jerk and then let go. Quick study, this one. It had taken me days to learn when Catherine was being herself and when she was wearing manners she'd found in a book somewhere.

"Yes, all right, welcome." Catherine turned away from him and looked at me. "Roddy, will you go and have a look at Nick? When I came down, he wasn't awake yet."

"He is now," I told her. "I'm going up there and getting to the bottom of this before he drifts off again. If I'm not back in an hour, send a rescue party."

I made a pot of coffee and put it on a tray with a dish of applesauce and some crackers, and took all of it upstairs. Nick was sitting at the little table, his hair damp, wearing clothes that weren't the ones he'd arrived in. He was looking out the window, but he swung round when he smelled the coffee.

"Oh, thank you," he said fervently. "I've been trying to nerve myself up to go downstairs and ask for it, and I couldn't manage it quite."

"Two years ago, you'd've pounded on the floor until someone came to look, and then demanded it," I said, sitting in the other chair and pouring out a cup for him. "No, two years ago you'd've been walking into walls with your eyes shut until someone found you and poured it down your throat. What's _happened_ to you?"

"Most of it was the…what happened with the Dragon," said Nick, fiddling with a cracker instead of meeting my eyes. "Part of it was trying to become the sort of person Romanov would be willing to teach. I wanted to do his sort of magic, as well as what Maxwell Hyde was teaching me, and he thought I was utterly useless."

"You'll get crumbs everywhere," I said irritably. "Why didn't someone tell me you were still having lessons with Grandfather? I would've come to visit while you were there."

"I asked them not to." Nick stared into his coffee cup. "I…after the Dragon. I wasn't." He smiled faintly. "I wasn't very good company."

"I would have come anyways," I said without thinking. We looked at each other for a moment.

Finally, I said, "You told me yesterday you could only get here because you were angry. Why were you angry?"

Nick shrugged and took a swallow of coffee. "It's going to sound stupid if I tell it. But. Well. My dad's getting married again."

"And that's not good?" I asked cautiously. Nick had told me a very little bit about his mother, who had died, and he hadn't sounded like he missed her overmuch.

"No, it is," said Nick. "She's called Rose, and she runs a grand sort of used book shop. She's all right, and she'll take really good care of Dad. It's only, it makes a change. Also, Maree's going to have a baby in September."

"Oh," I said. Nick had told me quite a lot about his half-sister. Maree is only about seven years older than Nick. They'd been raised to believe they were cousins, but she'd more or less brought him up since his own mother was so peculiar.

"So I was angry, even though I knew I didn't have any good reason to be," Nick went on. "And I did something stupid. Has your granddad ever told you about the Koryfonic Empire?"

"No," I said. "You did. You told me about your friend the centaur, who's going to be the next Emperor even though at first they thought it would have to be you."

Nick sighed. "Yes. I signed something called an Affidavit of Abdication. They've never had one before, because they used to kill all the heirs who didn't become Emperor. Rob didn't want me to sign it at first—he said I ought to wait a few years and be really certain I didn't want to inherit."

"What did you do?" I was fairly sure I knew.

"I had a standing invitation to visit the Empire. From my grandmother. Mum's mother." Nick reached for the cracker plate and looked surprised when he found he'd eaten them all. "I had it in my head that she was the only family I had left."

I pushed the bowl of applesauce towards him. "See if you can eat some of that, and then you can have some more coffee. Is that how you found out you could travel if you were angry enough?"

He nodded. "When I walked through a door and found myself in Iforion, someone recognized me and dragged me to see my grandmother before I could go to see Rob or anyone else."

"I take it that didn't go well," I said.

"It might have gone better," Nick admitted. "I was only there for a few days before Maxwell Hyde found me and hauled me back home. He tore strips off me for upsetting Maree, and for behaving like a spoiled child and--"

"And it made you so angry," I finished, "that you traveled again to prove you could."

"It wasn't _like_ that!" Nick slammed the spoon into the applesauce bowl. "You don't know. In the Empire, people are _adults_ when they turn sixteen. No one treated me like a kid. My grandmother threw a party for people to meet me. Everyone wanted to know what I thought about things, and how I would have solved this problem or that."

"Of course they did!" I snapped. "Don't they teach you any history on Earth?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Politics." I was suddenly dreadfully tired. I dropped back into my chair and pressed my hands to my temples, where the headache usually began. "Politics, Nick. I grew up at Court, remember? You're another son of their Emperor. You said it yourself, sixteen's the age of legal majority in the Empire. You were only fourteen when you signed away your rights. There's got to be someone who'd like to argue you were too young to know what you were doing."

Silence from the other side of the table.

I opened my eyes. Nick was looking as though he'd been slapped. "Your grandfather said something like that," he said quietly. "I kept telling him he didn't understand, but he did, better than me."

I was beginning to get a horrible uneasy feeling somewhere in the middle of my ribs. "Nick, did your grandmother simply let you leave Iforion?"

"Not exactly. There might have been some shouting. And, and, a promise to find me and bring me back." He shifted in his chair. "I _told_ you I'd done something stupid."

"You certainly have." I counted off on my fingers. "You've got yourself mixed up in an Imperial rebellion, you've disobeyed your teacher, you've run off to hide behind someone who doesn't owe you protection, and you've led whoever's chasing you straight to this house."

I could have added more, but Nick looked so miserable I couldn't bear to. He had sort of shrunk into his chair and clasped his hands together so tightly his knuckles were white. I could tell that, before now, he hadn't thought of that last bit.

If I were honest with myself, I didn't want to be sensible and solve problems. I wanted to wrap my arms round Nick again and look his grandmother in the eye and dare her to take him from me. I wanted to barricade the house with all of us inside it. I wanted Nick and I to both be five years old again, and to build a fort out of all the cushions in the house and hide inside it until the Empire got tired of searching.

Instead, I stood up and stacked all the dishes on the tray. "Come downstairs and meet Catherine and Max properly," I told him.

Nick smiled weakly. "I suppose I'd better. I think these are Max's clothes. Someone left them in the hallway outside my door last night, at any rate."

He pushed back his chair, stood up, took the tray from my hands, and set it on the table. He took both my hands in his, and pulled me towards him very slowly until our arms wrapped round each other, and we both hung on tight.

"It wasn't Romanov I came running to," Nick whispered into my hair. "When I landed here it was because I wanted so badly to find you."

** Thursday **

I slept heavily Wednesday night, better than I had in months, and the hens and the goat didn't wake me. So Thursday began with a row between Catherine and Max over who was going to cook breakfast. It sounded as though both of them wanted to cook and neither one wanted to do the washing-up afterwards.

By the time I'd woken up, got dressed, and plaited my hair, the shouting had been replaced by an occasional thump. I found Nick alone in the kitchen, washing out the teapot.

"Morning. We left you some breakfast." He jerked his chin towards the table. There was a plate of bacon and eggs and toast, covered with another plate to keep it warm, and a cup of coffee.

"Who ended up cooking it?" I asked, nibbling at a corner of the bacon.

"Both of them. I told them _I'd_ wash the dishes if they'd only shut up. I can't cook anything, so it stands to reason I should do something else."

I stared at him. "How are you even awake?"

"Catherine made the coffee." Nick grinned evilly.

I tried it. "Merciful powers. I'm surprised it hasn't eaten through the cup. Where are they?"

"Outside, washing things," said Nick. "She made Max and me put up a clothesline before she'd let us eat any breakfast." He set the teapot on the counter and sat down across from me. "Are you going to work in the garden today?"

"I certainly should," I said thoughtfully. "But I might need your help first."

Nick blinked. "Why?"

"Because Romanov was supposed to be back yesterday."

When I went outside to consult Catherine, I saw immediately that Romanov's absence hadn't escaped her. She'd found an enormous tin bucket somewhere and was elbows-deep in hot soapy water. Behind her back, Max gave me a harassed look.

"It's only one day, Catherine! Not even a whole day! Will you please stop worrying?"

"That's a losing battle," I told him. "Cate, Nick wants to show me some divination spells. We thought we might look in on Romanov's travel route. Want to join us?"

"You seem to be implying," _splash_ "that I might possibly give the faintest--" _splash_ "of tinker's _damns_ where he might be at the moment." Catherine picked up the empty laundry basket and threw it. It tumbled halfway across the yard.

"Right." I met Max's eyes and shrugged. "Best not to come into the kitchen for an hour or so, we're going to be drawing chalk marks on the floor."

Max followed me as far as the door of the house. "Roddy, is this normal?"

"A bit." I sighed. "Has she told you anything about her family?" He shook his head. "Well, Romanov's more or less all she's got. I don't think he's used to having anyone expecting him to keep a schedule, so I'm sure it's nothing."

"But you're asking Nick to look for him anyways." It wasn't a question.

"Wouldn't you?"

"I suppose." He looked across the yard to where Catherine was pinning pillow cases to the clothesline. She was pinching the clothespins so hard that, as we watched, one of them twisted its spring and leapt out of her fingers. Max bounded across to pick it up. I rolled my eyes and went back into the house.

Nick and I spent most of that morning trying all the different kinds of divinations either of us knew. Although neither of us said anything, we were both reminded of the last time we'd done this, in my grandfather's house. It wasn't a memory I wanted to keep.

Nick had clearly learned something in the intervening two years, because he didn't need any books this time--only chalk and a few other things from the drawer of miscellaneous bits and pieces under the kitchen counter. I knew very little, and most of what I did was feeding Nick power to boost his search range. My hands grew sweaty from holding his.

In the end, we gave it up. Either Romanov had some kind of protections on himself that kept him hidden, or he was so far away that Nick and I together weren't strong enough wizards to find him. Neither of us so much as mentioned the merest notion that he might be not be alive to be found.

Catherine was very quiet at lunch. I'd hoped she'd worked off some of her bad temper, but no such luck. When she'd finished eating, she went upstairs and collected all the clothes from the used-laundry hamper in the upstairs hallway. Max got up to follow her outside, but she gave him a ferocious glare and slammed the door in his face.

"All right, then," said Max. "I think that's a vote for me to get some studying done. Bang on the ceiling if I'm needed." And he went out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Nick and I stared at each other. "I think," he said after a moment, "Romanov's going to need to keep them in separate cages or something."

"Surely not," I said. "Max was head boy at that school of his, he's used to looking after other students. Besides, Catherine's only fourteen."

"Yes, well." Nick raised his eyebrows at me. "How old was I when I met you?"

Oh. _Oh._ I blushed, remembering suddenly the humid, sticky feeling that had been wrapped round me all the time, during the weeks when Nick _wanted_ in ways I only vaguely understood. Two years had improved both his control and my comprehension.

"That's Romanov's problem," I said hastily. "Want to come help me in the garden?"

"Not really," said Nick, but he followed me amiably enough.

Nick didn't, in fact, help much. He did fetch the wheelbarrow out of the shed, but once we arrived in the garden he seemed to consider his share of the work finished. While I snipped dead flower heads and untangled raspberry tendrils, he sprawled on the benches, and we brought each other up to date on what we'd each been studying. Neither of us mentioned Iforion.

It was terribly hot, without a hint of a breeze. As I worked, the sky slowly grew overcast. In mid-afternoon, Max came outside with a pitcher of fruit juice and three glasses.

"She's hung out all the laundry and gone upstairs to rest," said Max. "Her head hurts."

"Of course it does," I said. "She's been out in the hot weather for hours." He looked unconvinced. "Honestly, Max, you're a bigger worrier than my mum. Catherine can look after herself."

"She can't, you know." Nick had a ring of purple-red around his mouth from the juice.

Max gave him a sharp look. "You're one to talk. Have you told her," he jerked his head at me, "about Iforion?"

"_Yes_, he's told me," I said, feeling aggrieved. "And I'm _right here_, you could just ask me."

Nick growled and kicked at the gravel on the path. "All right. All _right_. Can we go inside where it's cooler?"

We sat around the table in the kitchen and looked at each other. After a moment, Nick said, "Catherine's head will just have to hurt. She needs to hear this too."

He went upstairs. Catherine came back down with him, looking pale and sleepy but not angry. Nick began to talk. Time passed, and we finished the juice and moved onto chamomile tea.

It wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Nick's grandmother had kept his presence a secret for the first two days, giving out vague hints that she had a particularly important and exciting visitor hidden in her house, so relatively few people had actually seen him before the night of the party. Also, from his description, she preferred to maneuver on her own account, rather than putting her trust in wild-eyed revolutionary types.

"She keeps it in the family," said Nick. "Not that that's much help. Half my cousins seem to be militarily inclined. If she sends any of them after me, I'm done for." I put my hand over his, where he'd been tapping out drumbeats against the table, and threaded our fingers together.

As Nick went on, it became clear that the other side frightened him considerably more. There was a lot of support in the Empire for his centaur friend who was slated to become the next Emperor. The current Emperor was widely respected, but quite a number of his subjects—humans and centaurs both—seemed to think that a dynasty of centaur Emperors would be an improvement.

"If I understand you," said Max, "anyone your grandmother sends is more likely to be a soldier. And anyone who's sent to make sure you never return to Iforion to claim the throne is more likely to be a mage. Is that about right?"

"Well, yes," said Nick. "But some of the soldiers may be mage-trained too, it's common in my mother's family. And most of the mages in the Empire know how to cause a _lot_ of pain, even if they're not fighters." His fingers tightened on mine.

"All right," said Catherine quietly. She hadn't spoken since coming downstairs, and we all looked at her. "We'll need some protection-spells and an early-warning system."

Max nodded. "I think you're right. What do you recommend?" I could see the effort he made to let Catherine give orders instead of running off on his own. Part of it was what he'd learned from the row they'd had that morning, but I think Catherine may also have told him something, by then, about where her magical talents lie. They don't know a lot about battle magics on Earth, which may have something to do with why Romanov took her away from it.

Catherine shut her eyes for a moment, and we waited while she thought. Then she opened them. "Roddy," she said, "can you do anything here like when you raised the land in Blest?"

I stared at her. "No, Cate, it's not…I…no."

"Why?"

"It was…" I tried to explain. "It was the right place, at the right time. It's not something I can do everywhere."

"Try," Catherine said grimly. "Romanov built this place out of all places and all times. There's got to be _something_ you can use."

I glanced at Nick. "I'll do the best I can. I just don't…"

Catherine spoke loudly, overriding me. "For the early-warning, we need something like a very light shield around the island that would…I don't know. Let us know if anything touched it. Do either of you know anything at all about protective magics?"

"A bit." Max stood up quickly. "They taught us some shield spells at school. Nick, you'll need to help me fine-tune it. I've never been off Earth before, so I don't know the feel of other magics. Can you come out and take a look at it, Cate, when we're done?"

"Yes." Catherine looked more alert than she had all day. "Warding the house won't take long, not with the protections Romanov's already set. Clear out, all of you, I'll need to start in the kitchen." Max and I headed for the door to the yard.

Nick followed us, more slowly. "I think we'd better begin this on the beach," he said to Max. "The water ought to magnify what we're doing."

"Are you sure it won't dilute it?" said Max.

"No. It's like light, not like wine," Nick tried to explain.

I left them wrangling over it and went into the garden. I followed the path to the bed of herbs where I'd picked spearmint for Nick—had that really been only three days ago?--and sat down on the low brick wall that edged it.

"Er," I began, feeling a bit foolish. "Hello. Er, I know there aren't elementals here, not like I'm used to. But if there _is_ anyone…" I trailed off. There very definitely weren't any unseen people listening to me, but just as definitely, there was something listening.

I took a breath. "All right. There's this, this person. And he's done something. It was really stupid, and he deserves some sort of punishment, I expect, but he doesn't deserve what he's apt to get. And he's come to me for help. I…" I stopped. "I need him to be all right. I need him. Please. Help me."

After that, I just sat for a long time. I was so still that a few inquisitive ladybugs crawled over my hands, and a dragonfly lighted on my arm for a moment. It was beginning to grow dark. Eventually, I got up and went back to the house.

Catherine was slicing cheese. "It's so late," she said as I came in, "we're just going to nibble on things. Do you want any of the leftover curried veg from lunch?"

"God, no," said Nick, coming in from the yard. "It's too hot for curry. Can you see the shield, any of you?"

I shut my eyes. "Just barely," I said slowly. "Not see it, exactly. Feel it, more like, like I can feel the humidity or the way the light changes towards sunset."

Max came in last, and flopped heavily into one of the kitchen chairs. "You were right," he told Nick. "It's fascinating, really, we're both perceiving magical energy as different states of matter, and Roddy's perceiving it as some mix of both of ours. What's it like for you, Cate?"

"Like something we can talk about after you've both _eaten something_." Catherine put the cheese on the table, and added two loaves of bread and some oranges. "Hasn't anyone taught either of you that you have to grow back the energy you use up?"

"Fuel, then," said Nick. "What would that be, solid and liquid and gaseous all at once? Or something that changes depending on what you're using it for." He and Max went on talking about it while we ate. Catherine and I sat listening to them, occasionally exchanging fond eye-rolls. Clearly, the symbol for _…Boys._ is common to all the different worlds.

After supper, Nick fished a deck of playing cards out of the kitchen junk drawer and suggested we play poker. The cards didn't look exactly like the ones I was used to from Blest, and the rules that the three of them knew were different from the ones Grundo and I had learned from the Court pages, but I picked it up quickly enough.

Hours later, we all stumbled upstairs. "We have to put the furniture back tomorrow," Catherine yawned, going into the bathroom as I was coming out of it. I nodded sleepily and began unplaiting my hair with my fingers as I fell into bed. The last thought I had before I fell asleep was that we were all making plans as if Romanov weren't coming back.

** Friday **

Friday began twice. The first time, less than an hour after it stopped being Thursday, was when Max rapped on my door.

"Roddy? Wake up. Come on."

I got up and opened the door. "What? Has the shield gone?"

"No." Max wasn't wearing his glasses. He ran a hand backwards through his hair, which had already looked like a bird's nest. "No, it's Nick. He's talking in his sleep or something. A bad dream, I think."

When we went down the hall to Nick's room, Catherine had opened the door but hadn't gone inside. She was standing in the hallway, looking anxious. Nick was tangled in his sheets and making whimpering noises.

"Oh good." Catherine stepped back when she saw me. "Roddy, you snapped him out of a panic attack when he landed here. Can you do it again?"

"I don't even know what I did." I went past her and sat on the edge of the bed. Nick had gone to bed without a shirt on, and when I put a hand on his bare arm I got a tiny electrical zap. "Storm's coming," I said. "Very soon. Dad says when it's this close, everything carries energy."

Catherine looked from me to Nick and back again. "Right," she said. "Max, we can both go back to bed now." She made little hand-flapping motions at Max until he went back down the hallway. The door, shutting behind her, sounded unnaturally loud.

I sighed. "Nick?" He muttered something and shook his head. "Nick, wake up. You're dreaming." And that was when the first massive crack of thunder hit the sky overhead.

Nick sat up with a wordless yell and fell out of bed.

"Oh, _honestly_." I hoped my voice didn't show how startled I'd been. "Let me close the windows. We'll have rain any minute."

When I turned back to face him, Nick was standing by the bed, shivering as though the temperature had dropped thirty degrees instead of only a few. Much to my relief, he was wearing the bottom half of someone's pyjamas.

"Here." I opened the cupboard and took out a blanket. When I tucked it around his shoulders, he clung to both my hands until I gave in and stood close enough to wrap it round us both. "Do you usually dream like that?"

"Yes." Nick's eyes were enormous, and his voice was cracked from shouting. "I've had the same dream, a few times a week, ever since the Dragon. It isn't usually that bad, or that loud." He smiled a bit. "Sleeping in strange places doesn't seem to be good for me."

I yawned. "Well, I don't intend for you to keep the rest of us awake. My room or yours?"

"_What?_" Nick's voice cracked again.

"The rest of us want to sleep. You don't sleep well in strange places. If I'm there, it's not a strange place. So, if I'm there, you'll sleep." I was glad it was too dark for him to see my face, or how much my hands were shaking. "Right, you took too long to decide, so I'm deciding. We're staying here."

Slowly, very slowly, Nick backed towards the bed. I crawled in beside him and pulled the blanket up over both our shoulders. Besides the expected tangle of knees and elbows, we both wound up with a faceful of my unbound hair.

Eventually we sorted out the spluttering and the giggles and lay still, curled together but apart like bashful spoons. The thunder and lightning went on. After a while, Nick's breathing evened out, slow exhales against the back of my neck. I lay awake for a while more, thinking about Romanov, and about my parents, and about anything else that would keep away thoughts of how tomorrow might go if our protections didn't work.

I don't really know when I fell asleep. Friday began, the second time, with rain. I woke to the sound of it hammering on the roof. Nick and I had somehow switched places in the night, and I was squashed against the wall.

"Oh, _hell_," I said. I shoved at Nick's shoulder. "Go on, get up. It's raining, and all the laundry is still hanging out on the clothesline."

That wasn't a good morning. All four of us ran outside in our nightclothes to fetch in the laundry, which was of course a lost cause by then. Catherine did a quick run on the morning chores while the rest of us spread the sopping sheets and clothes over any flat surfaces we could find that wouldn't be hurt by water. We drew straws for turns in the shower, and the person who got the fourth straw (that would be me) missed breakfast because the other three were too hungry to wait.

When the shouting about that was more or less finished, and the others had drunk more coffee while I finished eating, Max announced that we were all going to spend the morning magicking the wet out of the laundry before we did anything else. He and Catherine then had another flaming row, partly because she wanted us all to finish putting back the furniture and partly because he'd had the nerve to give orders in the first place.

Finally, Max bellowed, "Everything's going to grow _mildew_, you idiot kid! You can't just leave things lying around wet!"

Catherine shrieked in fury. Then she grabbed his hand and hauled him into the living room, where we'd spread most of the sheets. Nick and I followed in time to see her yell a few words and do something with the fingers of her free hand. There was a sound like someone sipping through the world's biggest straw, and a quick blast of wind that made us all sneeze.

When we opened our eyes again, all the sheets were dry, and the puddles on the floor where they'd dripped had evaporated. Catherine looked pleased with herself. Nick looked admiring. Max looked furious. He opened his mouth to speak.

And that's when the early-warning shield rang like a bell.

 

"Curtain's going up," said Max. He tipped his head to one side and made a listening sort of face. "I think it's coming from the beach."

Nick started for the kitchen and the door that would take him out to the yard. Then he stopped. "If this is who I think it is," he said, "he thinks I'm here alone. Anyone care to join me in exceeding his expectations?"

His tone was light, but his hands were shaking. I took his right hand in my left and we went out of the house together.

The alarm may have come from the beach, but by the time we got outside, the mage who'd set it off had made it as far as the patch of grass beside the garden. He was a tiny middle-aged man, probably no taller than Catherine and half her weight, with a bald spot and plain gray robes. As we approached, he bowed deeply.

"Hail, Prince Nichothodes," he said. "His Imperial Highness your father sends his regards."

Nick dropped my hand, took a step forward and made a slight bow of his own. "Your courtesy is appreciated, Mage Pelleon," he said. "Please convey my regards to His Imperial Highness in return."

"You can convey them yourself, my prince," said the mage. Despite his use of Nick's title, he sounded less like a respectful servant this time and more like a policeman. "I've been instructed to bring you back with me. You are to stand trial in the Emperor's court on the charge of conspiring against the throne."

"I regret," said Nick, his voice a fraction higher than usual, "that I'm unable to allow you to carry out your instructions. I don't intend to return to Iforion."

"Then _I_ regret, my prince, that I'm obliged to contravene your wishes." The mage shook the left sleeve of his robe, and something I couldn't see dropped into his hand. He began chanting under his breath. Nick gripped my shoulder, hard enough to bruise.

_Please_, I thought. _Not too much. Just enough. Please._

And the tangles of raspberry bushes stretched themselves out of the garden and reached round the mage's throat.

Nick opened his eyes. "What on Earth…" He gasped when he saw the mage struggling against the thorny vines. Raspberry bushes are easy enough to break, normally, but these were only wrapping tighter.

"I asked for help," I murmured. "I wasn't more specific than that."

As we watched, the mage swayed, tottered to his knees, and slowly fell over. The raspberry bushes immediately slithered off his neck and back towards the garden. _Thank you_, I thought.

Nick and I stood for a moment, watching the rain beat the blood away from the mage's collar and making sure we saw his chest rise and fall several times.

"He's passed out," I said finally. "Constriction of the airway. What'll we do with him?"

"Send him back where he came from." Nick hauled the mage over his shoulder in a fireman's lift and started walking.

When we got to the beach, I saw at once why the alarm had gone off here. There had been an old, old rowboat at one side of the beach. Now it was flipped over on the sand, and it looked as though someone had sliced off the bottom and replaced it with a cloud of glitter. Nick regarded this with interest.

"Max has got to see this," he said. "I always thought you had to make a worldgate out of something vertical. Hope you've laid something soft on the other end, Mage Pelleon." And Nick leaned over the cloud and dropped the mage into it.

Then he turned around, caught me by the shoulders, and kissed me—shyly, but with unexpected skill. I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to ask where he'd learned it. No one had ever kissed me before, anyways, and it was only because of the memories I'd inherited along with my magic that I had the remotest notion of how to kiss him back.

Eventually, I pulled away and leaned our foreheads together. "We'd better go," I said. "Cate and Max will think we've been defeated by the mage."

"No, they won't, not if they know what's good for them," said Nick, but he caught my hand in his and we walked back.

Judging from Max's smirk when we walked into the kitchen, both he and Catherine knew exactly what we'd been doing. He listened with interest to the tale of the sentient garden and the horizontal worldgate. Catherine, however, was frowning.

"They're going to send someone else," she said finally.

We checked the wards on the house (still working) and the shield Max had put over the island (undamaged, although if they could build a worldgate through it we were in trouble). After that, Max and Catherine put away the laundry and Nick and I had another go at divining for Romanov.

"You still haven't found him," said Catherine when she came to start making lunch.

"No." Nick twisted his shoulders to loosen them. We'd been hunched over a bowl of water for longer than I'd realized. "I found his trail, though. It leads to Iforion, and doesn't lead out again."

"Hmmm." Max reached over Catherine's head to fetch plates out of the cupboard. "If he were dead, would that leave a different trail than if he were alive?"

It was the question I hadn't wanted to ask. "Yes," Nick said. "Yes, it'd be different, and yes, he's alive. I just can't see where he is."

Catherine took a long, shuddering breath and burst into tears. Max absently folded his arms round her and fished a clean handkerchief out of his back pocket, still looking at Nick over Catherine's head.

"They knew you'd come here," he said. "You bragged, didn't you. You were at that party of your grandmother's, with everyone making a fuss over you, and you wanted to impress them with something you'd done instead of who your family was. And you told them you were going to be a student of the great and powerful Romanov."

Nick became extremely interested in his shoelaces.

Catherine shook herself away from Max and blew her nose on his handkerchief. "There's no use even being angry at you, is there," she said hoarsely. "What's done is done. Besides, whatever Romanov does to you when he comes back will be worse than whatever I can come up with. Who wants mac and cheese for lunch?"

The second alarm on the early-warning shield came partway through the afternoon. Max and I were holding up the top part of a bookshelf while Nick tried to fit the shelves back into the bottom. When the shield rang, Catherine came pounding down the stairs.

"On the beach," she said breathlessly. "I saw from one of the upstairs windows."

"This time we're all of us going," said Max firmly. He picked up one of the pieces of another bookshelf--this one was a metal bar, a few feet long with a nasty sharp bit on the end--and marched outside.

At first we thought the second messenger had been damaged by her journey through the worldgate, because she was lying sprawled on the sand as we approached. Once Max got close, though, she sprang to her feet all at once. I immediately wanted to learn how she'd done it.

"Nichothodes," the woman purred. She was a bit younger than my mother, with black hair cut short as a man's, and all her clothes were tight wine-red leather with dulled brass snaps and zippers. There was a short, curved sword hanging from her belt. No one had to tell me this was a warrior. Max tightened his grip on the metal bar.

"Vasha," said Nick evenly. "I have to say, you're not who I expected."

The woman Vasha chuckled. "Silly boy. I'm not here on your lady grandmother's behalf. Not for the sake of your sweet skin, either, so don't get excited."

"What are you here for, then?" Catherine had stepped up to stand beside Nick while none of us were looking. She glared fiercely at Vasha, just as if there were no weapons in play.

Vasha looked her up and down. "Accumulating an entourage already, Nick? Complete with bodyguard? How very like a prince. Although, I must say, she's nothing like a warrior."

"I'm no prince," Nick growled. "I signed the Affidavit of Abdication. I know you've seen it."

"I have," said Vasha. "And, for what it's worth, I accept its validity." She sighed, a nasty fake sadness. "But I'm afraid some of my associates don't agree with me. It's the whole mess about your being underage to sign a legal document."

It occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Max. I glanced out of the corner of my eye and didn't see him.

"Luckily for you," Vasha went on, "my associates are prepared to offer you a choice."

"What choice?" I had come up on Nick's other side.

"Oh, another one," said Vasha. "I hadn't thought you had it in you yet, Nick. Well, little warrior, your prince's choice isn't complicated. I can slit his throat here, or he can come back to Iforion and I can do it there."

"_No_," said Catherine and I together.

Vasha smiled thinly. "Are you going to let your women do your talking for you? I had thought..." Her voice trailed off. Slowly, slowly, her hand dropped from the hilt of her sword and she turned away from us and towards the worldgate.

"Max," muttered Nick without moving his lips.

That was when I heard the sound. Even with Nick's clue, I didn't immediately recognize it as a human voice. It floated through the gray, rain-washed daylight like a butterfly caught in a down-draft, circling round and back on itself. I thought of the glyph for the Koryfonic Empire, the figure-eight lying on its side--the sign of infinity.

Of course. Max had been head boy at a school that taught magic and music. For all I knew, he could charm the birds out of the trees.

Moving like a puppet, Vasha stumbled away from us, walked to the worldgate, and climbed through it.

"Max," said Nick again, louder, and Max staggered out of the little patch of woods at the edge of the beach.

"She--thinks she heard--her master calling her--home," he gasped. He was sweating, and had turned white as a sheet. "Best I could--do."

 

Catherine ran over to him and peered up into his face. I couldn't hear what she said, but he shook his head. Leaning on her shoulder, he crossed the beach to Nick and me.

"Your best was brilliant," Nick said. "Absolutely brilliant. Surprise was the only weapon we had any chance of using against her."

"Why?" said Catherine. "Back to the house, all of you, it's a lucky thing we've got dry clothes. Who is she, Nick?"

"Her whole name's Varyansa Kalavau," Nick told us. "She commands the private army of the Imperial Justiciar. He's a twister, turns a blind eye if you pay him enough. And _he_ thinks he's going to be Chancellor when Rob sits the throne. Vasha's not from Iforion, originally, she comes from someplace unpronounceable where they start training soldiers as soon as they can walk. It's because of her that no one's caused the Justiciar to have an unfortunate accident yet."

"Why do you call her Vasha?" Max was still out of breath.

"Because I danced with her twice at my grandmother's party." Nick blushed. "She wasn't wearing the leather things then."

When we got back to the house, Catherine bullied us all until we took hot showers and put on dry clothes and drank a particularly nasty flavor of tea that the Thalangians grow for medicine. After that, Max's breathing still sounded thick and wheezy, and he went upstairs to rest.

"Do you think they'll send another assassin?" Catherine said once.

I sighed. "No. We've had one person who wanted to arrest Nick in the name of the Emperor, and one who wanted to murder him in the name of organized crime. Who are we missing?"

"Oh hell," said Catherine. "His grandmother's envoy. Or watchdog, or whatnot. For all we know, the old lady will turn up in person."

Catherine, Nick and I finished re-arranging the furniture in silence. The rain still hadn't let up by the time we finished, and it made the early evening as dark as midnight. The house was growing chilly, too, despite the accumulated heat from the week's weather.

"All right if I light the fireplace?" Max had wandered back downstairs, wrapped in a quilt and dragging another after him. Catherine looked at him sharply.

"Yes, all right," she said at last, "if you think the smoke won't bother your lungs. Come on, Nick, we'll move some chairs around it."

They did that, and went outside afterwards to see to the animals. I heated up some soup and we sat round the fireplace and made cheese-toast. After we were done eating, Nick and I squashed together in the big armchair with the spare quilt, and Catherine sat at Max's feet and leaned her head on his knees, and we all stared into the fireplace.

We stayed like that until bedtime. It had been a long and busy day, and we'd all seen several new kinds of spellwork, but for once none of us felt like studying or debating or ferreting out the nature of magic. Mostly, the other three chatted about things they knew from Earth--music, books, computer games--and I snuggled against Nick and listened.

Without saying anything, we'd been expecting the shield to ring a third time. What we heard, instead, was a dull, muffled clank, like someone hitting an iron pot with a muffled hammer.

"Oh _no_," whispered Catherine. "Oh no. Nick, this one's here. Inside the wards. Inside the house. Inside the kitchen."

"It's all right," said Nick quietly. He pushed away the quilt we'd been sharing and stood up. "I know who this is, and you couldn't have stopped her."

I put a hand on his arm. "Where are you going?"

"To meet her." Nick looked down at me. "Roddy, I'm sorry. My grandmother's just won the fight."

"No," said Catherine. "_No_. What did I put all these wards on the house for, if you're just going to give yourself up?"

Nick swung round and looked at her. "For you three. " He'd gone pale, but his jaw was set. "You didn't really think I was going to hide, did you? Not really."

"What? Nick!" I hissed fiercely after him, but he'd already crossed the threshold into the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, I ran after him. He had gotten two or three steps into the kitchen and then frozen.

The woman standing in our kitchen wasn't Nick's grandmother. For one thing, she was only a year or two older than Nick. For another thing, she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, a pale, frail blonde in an elaborate blue brocade gown. The silver outline of the worldgate behind her, glittering in the doorway, looked like a portrait frame.

And for the third thing, she stepped forward, caught Nick's chin in her tiny hand, and kissed him on the mouth for a very long time. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I could only just barely breathe.

Finally, she let go and took a step back. "Oh, Nick. You've no idea how much I've missed you." That was when she saw me and Catherine and Max standing behind him. "Are these your friends? Do introduce me."

"You're in our house," said Max between clenched teeth. "How did you get past Catherine's wards?"

The woman giggled, a silver-bell sound. Of course. Even her laugh was lovely. "Is that what those were meant for? They weren't bad at all, really, but they're no match for shared blood." She put her arm through Nick's and swung him round, somehow, so he was standing at her side facing the three of us. His face was carefully blank, unless you looked in his eyes.

"Shared blood," said Max flatly. "Nick, start talking." Without my noticing, Catherine had stepped slightly in front of me. Max slipped a hand round my elbow. I wasn't sure whether they thought I was going to collapse in hysterics or go for the beautiful woman's throat.

I could tell the exact moment when Nick's Empire manners won out over his sheer panic. "My lady," he said, "allow me to make known to you Catherine Novarro of Romanov's house, Matthew Burton, recently of the Academy of St. Hilary, and Arianrhod Hyde, granddaughter of the Magid Maxwell Hyde."

"So _formal_," said the woman, giggling, as if she were squealing over an adorable kitten.

"Max, Cate and Roddy," Nick went on, "this is the Lady Kalanthia. My fourth cousin twice removed. A favorite of my lady grandmother's."

"And," added the Lady Kalanthia, smiling, "Nick's affianced bride."

"I beg your pardon?" said Nick. If you didn't know him, you would have missed the way his voice had gone from bland politeness to suppressed anger, and the way his brain was suddenly working again.

"Your grandmother's making all the arrangements," the Lady Kalanthia cooed. "All you need to do is come home with me.

"You're lying." Max's hand tightened on my arm. "Nick's been in love with Roddy since he was fourteen. He's never made any secret of it."

"Oh, yes." The Lady Kalanthia turned her enormous blue eyes on me. "Now I remember the name.

"I'm sure you don't mind, dear," she went on. "Nick's going to be the Emperor, after all, and he needs a wife who's..." Her gaze took in my tangled hair, sunburnt face, and old sweater. "A wife who can rule at his side as Empress."

"Nick's sixteen years old," I said evenly. "He's going to be sitting his school exams next month, and learning to drive his uncle's car. Whatever else he might need, he doesn't need you."

"Stop," said Nick. "Don't, Roddy." A moment ago, I'd practically been able to see him thinking, planning. Now, as I watched, he was suddenly terrified.

The Lady Kalanthia's smile changed, all in a flash, from sweet to venomous. It was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen.

"Really, Nick," she hissed. "I'm not surprised you haven't taught your servants any manners, raised as you have been, but I didn't think you'd allow them to insult me."

She looked at the three of us. "The fat one and the little Magid bitch are never getting near Iforion, of course. But you may as well bring the bard. He looks like he might be better in bed than you."

"Cate, _no_." Max squirmed, trying to reach round me to grab Catherine. "Stop her, Roddy!"

But Catherine was out of my reach by then. I still wouldn't have dared to touch her if she hadn't been. She was so angry I saw sparks flaring off the ends of her hair.

She took a slow step towards the Lady Kalanthia, and another. Their eyes were locked, blue on blue and nearly glowing with rage. The Lady took a step backwards.

Brushing past Nick as though he weren't there, Catherine backed the Lady towards the worldgate. Max and Nick and I watched, none of us daring to move. At the doorway where the worldgate glittered, the Lady Kalanthia paused on the threshold.

She looked at Catherine for a long, long moment. She said, "And still I say, tomorrow we shall meet." Then she lowered her eyes and stepped backwards into the worldgate.

The glittering frame disappeared. Catherine spat, accurately and somehow formally, on the spot where the Lady had stood. She shut the door with an air of finality. She still hadn't spoken.

I let out the breath I hadn't known I was holding. Before I could say anything, Max's hand tightened on my arm again. Without a single creak of clothes or joints, Catherine crossed the room and knelt at my feet as Max had knelt at hers.

"Someday," said Catherine, head bowed before me, "everything that lives and grows will answer to you and rise to your hand if you ask it." Her voice sounded odd, hollow. "You are fit to be Empress, but you were born to be more."

Nick stirred, and I raised my face from Catherine to look at him.

"Roddy," he said. "Roddy, I. I couldn't tell you, it was the last thing, the thing I hoped would never..."

"Shut up," said Max harshly. I had known him for five days, for a lifetime made small, and I had never heard that tone in his voice. "You're not going to hurt her any more tonight."

Catherine shook her head a bit, blinked, and struggled to her feet as I'd seen her do a hundred times. Without taking his eyes off Nick, Max reached out a hand to help her up. The three of us stood there, a group, with Nick a million miles away on the other side of the kitchen.

"I'm going to put out the fire," I said quietly. "And we all need to go to sleep. The three of us have done more magic today than we're used to doing in a month."

Catherine put a hand on my shoulder and walked me to the living room. Max came in behind us and folded the quilts he'd brought downstairs. And then the three of us went together up the stairs to our separate bedrooms.

I don't know when Nick finally went to bed. For all I know, he stayed awake all night.

** Saturday **

Saturday began with the sounds of the hens, and the goat, and Catherine whistling while she did the milking. The sunlight poured in through the window, and for an embarrassingly long time I simply lay there.

It took me a little while, but I finally decided that no, I hadn't dreamed it, and yes, Friday had really happened. My magic had disabled a mage, and Max's magic had beguiled an assassin, and when Catherine's magic failed her she had driven away a powerful mage through sheer fury. Not to mention the possibility that she'd spontaneously manifested a gift of prophecy afterwards.

Romanov really ought to be told about that. I got myself out of bed and into the shower thinking about what kinds of spells I might need to ask my grandfather for, to find Romanov. Since I was never going to speak to Nick again, using his divination spells was clearly impractical.

When I came downstairs to start cooking breakfast, Romanov was sitting at the kitchen table sipping coffee and eating an extremely crumbled scone.

"Did you bake this?" he said. "It's tasty, but I think it's gone a bit stale."

"Of course it has, I made that batch days ago." I dropped into the chair Nick usually sat in. "My grandfather made me promise not to inquire into your business, but _what happened to you?_

"I meant to come home Wednesday, but I got a message Tuesday telling me that Nick was in danger in Iforion," Romanov said. "And when I got there, I got clapped into someone's private dungeon for my pains."

"Let me guess," I said. "Nick's grandmother."

He tapped the end of his nose. "Got it in one. Anyways, it wasn't anything I couldn't get out of, not really, but I thought I'd better try and find out what was happening."

I raised my eyebrows inquiringly. "Did you?"

Romanov shrugged. "Some of it. Nick needs to hear it first, and he can decide what to share with the rest of you." He looked at me. "I'll tell you this, though: he didn't know they were serious about his getting married. Sixteen's young for a man to marry, even in the Empire. He thought they were only teasing him."

Something in my face made him add quickly, "But that's no affair of mine. How have things been here? I'm sorry I couldn't send a message."

"Catherine made us clean the entire house," I said, and fetched my own breakfast while I waited for the incoherent ranting to stop.

"Max is upstairs," said Romanov when he'd calmed down. "I made him go back to bed as soon as I heard those lungs of his. His teachers were quite right to send him to me, he's a superb musician but he's got no sense of proportion at all. And Catherine and I," he looked quite grim, "are going to have a nice long chat about how a magical house maintains itself."

"I thought I'd go and sit in the garden," I said. "It did me a tremendous favor yesterday, and I'm grateful."

Romanov looked at me sharply. "Sounds as though you and I need to have a chat, as well. Speaking of which, do you know where Nick's got to?"

I blushed hotly. "I don't know. I don't care. He was still down here when I went to bed. He could have fallen into the lake for all of me."

"You don't care where he's gone. Really," said Romanov meditatively. "Because I heard a different story yesterday. From the Lady Kalanthia, I believe her name was? We spoke briefly when she came to let me out of Nick's grandmother's lockup."

"_Kalanthia_ set you free?" In the clear light of morning, I was not going to call her Lady, not ever.

"Yes." Romanov swallowed the last of his coffee. "When she came back to Iforion empty-handed, she had a considerable amount of explaining to do. My disappearance will have embarrassed some of the people who had the temerity to call her to account. Besides, I think Kalanthia would rather poison and slander her way to the Imperial Throne for herself than be used by her family."

He gave me another pointed gaze, gentler this time. "Try not to be too hard on him, Roddy. He's going to deserve you someday, you know, if he ever outgrows being a complete idiot."

I went out of the kitchen, laughing, and into the garden. Without thinking about it too much, I passed the fruit and the herb beds and turned down the path for the rose garden.

The first roses you see in Romanov's garden are white. I went past them, following the turns of the path through shoulder-high bushes covered with flowers that went from white to pale pink and darkened as I kept going.

The path led to a little clearing in the center of the garden, with a single red rosebush and a stone bench, and another path on the other side leading back into the rest of the garden. It took me by surprise; Romanov had never struck me as the romantic type. I sat down on the bench.

"Thank you again," I said to whoever might be listening. "I wouldn't have done without this week for all the world. Even if it's never all right again, even if we're not, I, well, thank you."

After that, I fell silent and just sat, breathing in the heavy scent of the roses and listening to the birds. And that's where Nick found me.

I heard the footsteps on the gravel of the path before I saw him. Catherine's steps would have been lighter, Max's would have been faster. I thought that if I got up and ran away before Nick reached me, the rosebushes might reach out and weave their blossoms and thorns together to bar my path.

Nick sat down next to me on the bench and didn't say anything for a while. Finally, he took a deep breath and said, "There's no real point in my apologizing, is there."

"Not really."

He shifted his feet. "I thought it was a joke. Some of the young men in the family were saying something about my grandmother marrying me off, and teasing me about who it might be. But I thought they meant she'd try it when I was much older. And if any of them had said Kalanthia would accept an arranged marriage, I wouldn't've believed them."

I looked at him sidelong. "Nick, if you tell me that that was the first time you'd kissed her, I'll smack you. She said she'd missed you. And…" I wasn't going to repeat what she'd said about Max and bed.

Nick knew what I meant. He went scarlet. "There was a kissing game at my grandmother's party. It's common at family parties in the Empire; they think there that half the fun of it is never knowing whether someone you're kissing is actually your cousin." He shuddered. "The rest of it…Roddy, she made it up, I swear. Or someone else did, and told her to say it. I knew it was likely they'd send Kalanthia, because she's so good at worldgates, but I didn't know she was going to claim betrothal rights."

We sat there for a few minutes without saying anything. Finally I said, "Why did you say your grandmother had won? If we hadn't followed you, you were going to go back with her, even if she hadn't said anything about marriage."

"When Cate said the gate was inside the wards, I knew I'd been right about who they were going to send. I would have gone back to Iforion to keep Kalanthia from taking an interest in the rest of you." Nick's breath hitched, "Kalanthia is a _very_ powerful mage, and she enjoys hurting people ."

I thought about that, thought about what Catherine had done. "Oh. Er. That could have been a problem."

"'Problem' might cover it, if you stretched it thin." Nick gave a horrible shaky little laugh. "You know the funniest thing? She's my dream girl."

"Catherine?" I stared at him.

"No. Kalanthia. The bad dreams, the ones that wake me up at night. She's what I dream of. I'm always watching her, in the dream, watching her with her toys, but I can't move to take them away from her.

"Roddy, when you caught her attention, when she was right there with you, it was worse than the worst dream I'd ever had."

I turned to look at him. If he'd smiled, or widened his eyes, or looked sheepish, I would have pushed him off the bench and run back to the house and never spoken to him again. Instead, he only looked terribly tired.

"Don't do this to me again," I said after a moment. "I know you meant it kindly, but you can't not tell me things. Please."

"No." Nick shook his head. "I won't. I mean, I will. I mean, you know what I mean."

"Yes." I stood up and took him by the hand. "Come on. We've given Romanov and Catherine plenty of time to shout at each other. It should be safe to go back now."

We didn't hurry, walking back through the roses and the rest of the garden and up to the house. Yesterday's storm had broken the heat, and the sun didn't burn like it had earlier in the week.

"I'll have to go home," Nick said. "But I'll come back as soon as I've seen Maree and Rupert and my dad. Oh God, and I'm going to have to apologize to Maxwell Hyde, and ask his permission to court his granddaughter." He sighed. "Roddy, this prince business isn't going to go away. I'm going to have to go there sometime and settle it."

I tightened my fingers around his. "Not by yourself, you're not."

_Message to the Koryfonic Empire_, I thought. _ If you think you're going to get Nick Mallory to do anything he doesn't want, you'd better have a backup plan._

* * * * * * * *

_So far, that's where it ends. I'd better go back and begin taking out the bits that I don't want Maree and the Magids to read. Really, most of the bits with Nick had better be taken out. Besides being embarrassing, and not of particular interest to anyone who's not a teenage girl, I don't really want the Magids knowing too much about the Lady Kalanthia, or about Catherine's and Max's magic. When all's said and done, the Magids have to fall in with what's Intended. If it should turn out to be Intended that Nick become the Emperor, after all, I'm going to need every secret weapon I can lay my hands on. _

 

* * * * * * * *

**You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.**\--Napoleon Bonaparte


End file.
